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On March 8, after me being with Ubisoft Massive for almost two years, The Division was officially released. I wanted to write something about that sooner, but is has been pretty busy before and after the launch of the game.

So here we are in June, where the game has been out for almost three months now and I had my two year anniversary just last week. It’s great to see how the game is doing now that it’s out in the wild, breaking all kinds of records and having players create video content and provide feedback.

With the 2015 regular season well underway, I thought it would be nice to finally write something on what I’ve been thinking about a lot regarding the NFL’s post-season. From a game design point of view, there is one thing that seems illogical to me.

Also, the league has been contemplating the addition of an extra wild card slot in each conference. Which brings me to the intention of this article.

In the third community Q&A video released yesterday, Hamish once again throws questions asked by the The Division community at his fellow colleagues at Ubisoft Massive. For this video, I got to explain a little bit about how weapon customization will work.

In anticipation of E3, Massive released the first ever community Q&A video for The Division. Presented by community developer Hamish Bode, it features questions asked by members of the community in video form, which are then answered by developers from Massive in this video.

After working at Vanguard Games for almost seven years, half of which was while it was still called W!Games, I am leaving the company. This week, I sent out the same type of e-mail I’ve been reading every time a former colleague announced his departure and I’m having mixed feelings about the upcoming goodbye gathering and speech, to be held on my last day of work at Vanguard.

I’m incredibly proud of the games we’ve been making together at Vanguard and I’ve worked with a lot of talented people there, some of which have become good friends. Being hired by what was then still W!Games was a turning point in my life, both professionally and personally, and it has been a great start of my career in the game development industry. I have to admit that I’ve been keeping an eye out for something new for quite some time, because I’ve always wanted to work abroad and also experience working at another studio. Starting and finishing Halo: Spartan Assault was very important to me and wrapping that up was a good moment for me to actually make a switch. So what am I going to do now?

Today Microsoft officially announced that Halo: Spartan Assault is coming to Xbox One and Xbox 360 in December. It will be available as a downloadable title.

This console version of Halo: Spartan Assault includes Operation Hydra, which was free DLC for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. The biggest addition are all new co-op missions that put players up against The Flood, armed with new weapons, abilities and upgrades. Of course, there will be new Achievements as well.

On Thursday July 18, it was announced at Comic-Con in San Diego that Halo: Spartan Assault would launch at 4:00 PM (PST). That’s 1:00 AM (GMT) on July 19, our local time in Amsterdam. So when we all got up in the morning to go to work on Friday, the game had launched.

Of course, this is a very exciting time for me and my colleagues, as reviews start popping up and people are talking about the game both online and offline. To celebrate, we ate a custom Halo: Spartan Assault cake made by my sister, based on the model of the grenade case as it appears in our game. Instead of grenades, a tablet with a very detailed Spartan on top of it was placed inside the case.

Today marks an important moment for Vanguard Games and me personally. After working in secret for quite some time, our project Halo: Spartan Assault has finally been revealed.

Of course, I’m incredibly proud to be part of such a high-profile and important project. In short, it’s a top-down action shooter for touch-based devices, set in the Halo universe and taking place between Halo 3 and 4. To see more of the awesome visuals and action-packed gameplay, take a look at the announcement trailer.

In this article series, on Tuesdays developers write about their line of work. Nikki Kuppens is game designer at Vanguard Games, which is currently wrapping up Gatling Gears.

Although no official release date has been announced, it won’t be long before the first ‘freemium’ game will reach the Xbox 360. The title in question is Dungeon Fighter Online, made by Nexon. They are also responsible for the possibly better known Maple Story.

DigIt is a game for mobile phones I made during the Game Design & Development course at the Utrecht School of the Arts. Before we actually made a working version, I had already used the game concept by itself to apply for that course. The finished game was well received and very much complete, but after the project was officially over I saw some opportunities to improve the game even further. That’s what this article is about.

So, before you continue, please take a look in my portfolio to see how DigIt works exactly. It’s been a while since we completed DigIt, but I thought the design notes I made then (while playing the game on my Nokia 7610) would make for an interesting article about hands-on game design. We’ll start off with the one change to the game mechanics and then review the interface to better support gameplay.